The newsletter of UCL Medical School: highlighting achievements by staff and students; communicating developments in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate activities of the Medical School; and sharing good practice between medical educators.

Errordiary – mistakes win prizes!

A new competition asks medical professionals, people with diabetes and members of the general public to enter a competition to share their mistakes.

The competition, part of a project called Errordiary, opened on 15 October and hopes to tackle issues such as non-compliance with medication, the ‘blame culture’ of many hospitals, and the more general fear of mistake-making.

Errordiary is based around a website where people can share their errors and resilience strategies by engaging with different media. People are able to share their posts via Twitter (#errordiary) or directly through the website.

The organisers, who are academics from the UCL Interaction Centre, are offering a total prize fund of £900, which is broken down into a series of £30 prizes for the person that posts the most, the person the posts the most interesting error, the funniest error, etc.

Dominic Furniss, from the UCL Interaction Centre, said:

“We want to stress that error is perhaps more normal and ubiquitous than people think and that error can be funny and very serious.

“The competition is to encourage people to post their errors and resilience strategies. We are asking the questions ‘Have you done something daft today?” and “What tricks have you got to avoid errors?”

The ultimate aim of Errordiary is to see whether distilling and sharing resilience strategies to avoid error can benefit those that might want to adopt or adapt them.This is most likely to be effective if specific communities share tips and tricks within their specialist groups.

For example, David Cragg, a diabetes patient who has used the site, said: “My fast-acting insulin is in a silver pen and my slow-acting insulin pen is in a blue pen. This helps me to remember because, in my mind, ‘silver bullet’ means fast and ‘chilled blue’ means slow.”

The competition closes at midnight 6th January 2014 so enter now and you could win one of the many prizes!